All of the big four banks in Australia use Cobol, as well as 50 per cent of the tier two, all of the large insurers and 70 per cent of the second-line ones. Some 50 to 60 per cent of government agencies also use the language. But none of the young people coming into the industry seem to be learning it, or any of the other old languages, like Fortran or Delphi.

Kevin Francis of Object Consulting has said that those who do know how to use these older technologies are able to charge seemingly ludicrous rates.

Francis said: “I have seen examples of developers on older technologies like RPG and Delphi charging twice the rate of a developer on a newer technology.“

Maybe time to dust off your Delphi Developer docs and head for Australia

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You don't need to be a genius to debug a pf.conf firewall ruleset, you just need the guts to run tcpdump

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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick

It's not just Australia. I looked it up some time ago after a friend (a COBOL programmer) said it was still being used a lot, I didn't believe him at first but apparently there's a lot of COBOL code out there. "Billions and billions" of lines as Sagan would say

I always have to think of the Dijkstra quote: "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.".

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

Somehow, I rather think that Java, JavaScript, and the mainstream .NET languages are rather the oldest younger monkies seem to be proficient in, there's an evilly common open source one in that mix that I will not foul this forum with the name of.

For some reason, I'm starting to feel strange for being accustomed to Perl and C :-/.

This made me think of an old friend of mine. I Google'd and found him on LinkedIn. There he lists that he still works for the same bank as a COBOL programmer/analyst. When he was going to school for this, in the early '80s, I would make fun of him for taking COBOL cause it was so antiquated.